App.net: the paid Twitter alternative with users, not advertisers, at heart

A team of developers is working on a plan to launch
exactly what many had hoped Twitter could have been -- an
API-driven realtime social feed with users and developers, rather
than advertisers, at its heart.

On 1 July, Dalton Caldwell, who founded Imeem and has
worked on projects including SourceForge and picplz, published a blog post called
"What
Twitter could have been". In it, he wrote that early in the
social network's life there had been "a hugely divisive internal
debate" in which "one camp wanted to build the entire business
around their realtime API [and] the other camp looked at Google's
advertising model for inspiration".

He said that he believed that "an API-centric Twitter
could have enabled an ecosystem far more powerful than what
Facebook is today", lamenting that, "If you are building an
advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to
own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical
step would be to kill all third-party clients, and lock down the
data in the global firehose in order to control the 'content'."

Two weeks later, Caldwell returned to
his blog to reveal that his post had not simply been general
musings about what might have been. In fact, he said, he and the
team at mobile app development and marketing platform, App.net, had been working on a
"secret project" for the last eight months. The plan, he announced,
was to launch exactly what he had thought that Twitter could have
been.

The decision to set up this new service was "a
culmination of different factors," Caldwell told Wired.co.uk. "A combination of frustration as a
developer on other folks platforms, building a paid service to help
other app developers, and long-term disappointment with what my
favourite social sites 'turn into'."

Step one was to convince people to pay for his new
service -- an unusual move in these freemium times. Not only that,
he needed to convince people to pay for a service they'd not yet
seen.

To get this new social network off the ground, Caldwell
hypothesised that he would need around 10,000 users, each paying a
minimum of $50 (£32) for annual membership. So, App.net set up a crowd-funding campaign, seeking
$500,000 (£320,000) by 13 August. 10,000 early adopters at $50 each
would meet the goal, though there is also a $100 (£64) developer
tier, and $1000 (£640) gets you full access plus phone support and
a personal meeting with Caldwell.

Hitting this target would reach the "critical mass"
to make it viable, says Caldwell. But 10,000 people is a long way
off the 900 million or so on Facebook. That's not the point though,
he says. "I don't think that it could achieve the level of users
Facebook has. That is not one of the goals. In a paid service like
this we can run a very interesting and financially sustainable
service off a smaller userbase."

In a video
introducing the campaign, Caldwell lays out the core values of the
new App.net service: "Number one, we will never be ad-supported --
our product is the service that we sell, it is not our users.
Number two, our second core value, is that our entire company will
be aligned with making the most innovative, fun project we can, and
we will spend literally zero time trying to build products that
could appeal to advertisers -- cos we don't have advertisers. The
third core value is our commitment to developers. We're making a
promise that we'll never screw over good faith hackers."

So far the campaign has raised over $210,000
(£134,000) and the support of tech industry figures such as Robert
Scoble, Instapaper founder Marco Arment, Mozilla's Senior Director
of Firefox Engineering J Nightingale, and Gizmodo and Engadget
founder Peter Rojas. However, with the funding deadline of 13
August fast approaching, there is still a long way to go.

The project has generated "a lot of strong opinions,
both positive and negative" so far, says Caldwell. But work on
App.net continues with improvements being made based on the
feedback of alpha users -- who it's hoped will evangelise the
product and convince more to come on board.

"We shipped an alpha version of the product to
address feedback that this felt like 'vaporware'," Caldwell
explained. "I am spending all of my cycles to ensure that we hit
our goal".

And if they don't make it to the target? Well, then
no one is charged for their pledge and everything returns to zero.
But, promises the App.net FAQ, "we will publish what we learned
through this process." And that could be invaluable to the next
person who tries.